The politics of plurilingualism: Immersion, translanguaging, and school autonomy in Catalonia

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the politics of plurilingualism in education and, more concretely, the various interests at play behind the introduction of innovations by education authorities in Catalonia, Spain. To do this, the paper critically examines the linguistic model of language in education and the public debate that its introduction generated, focusing on three themes: immersion, translanguaging, and school autonomy. The model, which acknowledges cultural diversity and values plurilingualism, would appear to embrace developments in the field of multi/plurilingual research, although there have been disparate interpretations of the policy. But this case also represents the “politics of innovation”, that is, the invocation of international educational trends for political purposes. The paper (a) argues that sociolinguistic scholars should seriously scrutinise how research may become a sociopolitical tool external to sociolinguistics, and (b) claims that sociolinguists should be more attentive to how we lend our own professional concepts to political agendas.

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